


In Moments That Were Eternities

by Wolf_of_Lilacs



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Afterlife, F/F, HP Femslash MiniFest, Implied Sexual Content, Technically Forced Proximity?, lot of angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-31
Updated: 2019-03-31
Packaged: 2019-12-30 03:46:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18307538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wolf_of_Lilacs/pseuds/Wolf_of_Lilacs
Summary: Merope watched her baby grow.And then was joined by someone else.Written for the prompt "forced proximity" for the HP Femslash MiniFest.





	In Moments That Were Eternities

**Author's Note:**

> This is probably a rather loose interpretation of the prompt.
> 
> Thank you to RedHorse for the beta and for sailing with me on this strangest of ships. ❤

Merope watched her baby grow.

She could do nothing, really, except sit on a bench that was always comfortable enough and see as if through a fogged bit of glass…

Pain he caused and death he brought about.

She had no choice but to sit alone and see the horrors he wrought, to mourn that she could not be close, to mourn that he went on alone.

(To mourn when he killed Tom, then shed his face. But he was her baby.)

No one ever came to her, where she sat upon her bench. Time crept by. She felt its passage, yet it seemed not to matter, for she did not change or feel hunger or any pressing physical needs.

But then her baby died-didn’t-die, and everything changed.

*

A woman appeared.

She lay with her eyes closed in the middle of the plain white floor, dark red hair spread behind her head. Merope watched her, watched the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed, watched the twitching of one of her hands, resting upon her stomach. Watched and wondered how long she herself had lain like that when she’d first arrived.

All at once the woman sat up, her eyes flying open and her lips parting in a silent wail.

“You’re all right,” Merope tried to assure her, but she didn’t know if she was heard. The woman looked about, her head snapping from side to side, before at last she seemed to relax and take several gasping breaths.

“Where am I?” Her voice was hoarse. She brushed the hair from about her face, tucking it behind her ears in a habitual motion.

Merope’s mouth went dry. She recognized her now; her boy had just killed her. “You—” She considered how to phrase it, wondered if she should say it at all. “You’re dead.”

Her companion, instead of panicking further, seemed to relax at the news. “Yes,” she mumbled. “I suppose I am.” She examined their surroundings more calmly, a little furrow forming between her golden brows. “What is this place, then? And who are you?”

“I’ve been here for I don’t know how long, and I still have no idea,” Merope replied. “As for me, I’m Merope.” Her own name felt foreign on her tongue, and she wondered how long it had been since she last spoke it.

“I’m Lily.” She held out her hand, tremulous. “Nice to meet you, even under these circumstances.”

Merope took the proffered hand. Lily’s skin was warm—alive—against hers, and she deeply regretted that propriety demanded she let go so soon.

*

Her son had disappeared. Merope thought she saw him sometimes, a wisp flitting about a forest, but she’d blink and lose sight.

Lily was watching someone, too. “Harry,” she said his name was, the little boy Tom-Voldemort had failed to kill.

Merope didn’t know what to make of that. Why were the two of them here, together? She couldn’t bring herself to tell Lily who her son was. She couldn’t bare the thought of ending this tenuous, blossoming friendship between them.

“Oh, why does she treat him so?” Lily lamented. Her little boy was raised no more gently than Merope’s had been.

“People aren’t kind to motherless orphans,” Merope replied darkly.

Lily’s expression crumpled. “I would be,” she said.

Lily’s boy looked a bit like her own, Merope noticed. Small and dark-haired and curious and wide-eyed. “So would I,” Merope assured her (although she really didn’t know), and Lily smiled in gratitude.

*

“Time is so strange here,” Lily said one day, when years that felt like moments that felt like eternities had gone by. “Harry’s going to Hogwarts, and we’re still here where nothing has changed.”

Tom-Voldemort was going _back_ to Hogwarts. Merope had finally found him and hadn’t lost sight, for he had possessed a wizard wandering within his forest. Her heart lifted to have found him again, but she still did not tell Lily.

“This isn’t the place where things are meant to change,” Merope mused. “We can only watch. We are not important here.”

“I want to be there with Harry!” Lily sighed. “To show him the magical world and…” And so many things she often dwelt upon.

“I know,” was all Merope said, taking Lily’s hand. Lily returned the grip, and they didn’t let go for a long, long time.

*

“Voldemort was Tom Riddle.” Lily said the second name slowly, experimentally. “It doesn’t suit him, does it?”

Merope bit her lip, as they both watched Lily’s boy grasp a phoenix’s tail and fly away from a serpent’s corpse and the remnants of a memory of how her darling had once been. “He looked just like his father,” she whispered. “And then he Vanished it all away.”

“You speak as if you knew him,” Lily said.

Merope gazed at her, into burning green eyes. She’d held off long enough. What did it matter if Lily hated her? She was trapped here, too. “I watch him, as you watch Harry. He’s my son.”

“Oh,” Lily said. There was no surprise in her voice, no change in the gentleness of her expression. “I’m sorry that he’s…” She trailed off, uncertain.

“I’m sorry that he killed you. I didn’t know how to tell you.”

“Maybe our sons are why we’re here together,” Lily guessed, putting an arm over Merope’s shoulders and drawing her close. “Whatever it is that seems to tie them together also affects us.”

Merope inhaled Lily’s sweet, warm scent and leaned her head against Lily’s shoulder. “I don’t want him to die,” she admitted.

Lily didn’t pull away.

*

He died. He died at his own rebounding curse, from his own ignorance and misjudgment. He died because of Lily’s son.

Lily held her as she cried, rocking slowly back and forth and patting her hair, making the sort of noises one would to a squalling babe.

“How can you bare to comfort me?” Merope hiccupped. “He doesn’t deserve to be mourned.”

“It’s not about him,” Lily said simply.

*

Lily’s boy lived well. He married and had three lovely children. He seemed to gaze off sometimes, though, with a hand over his forehead.

“I wonder what he’s thinking of,” Merope said.

“Voldemort,” Lily replied, matter-of-fact.

Neither of them knew where Tom-Voldemort had ended up. They had never seen him, though they’d never met anyone else here besides each other.

Harry went on living.

Lily and Merope remained where they were.

“It’s like we need to do something before we can move on,” Lily finally guessed. “But I can’t imagine what.”

But Merope wondered, wondered if her worst secret kept them here. It was the only thing she had held back.

“I gave my husband love potion and held him against his will,” she said in a rush. “I loved him. It was never enough. He wouldn’t even stay for the baby!”

“I ignored my best friend when he came to me for help,” Lily confessed. “He said he wanted out of Voldemort’s mess, and I laughed in his face and said I’d never forgive him.”

Their guilt was heavy in the air between them, but they still did not move on.

“What keeps us here?” Lily exploded. “I want to see my family, my friends. Why am I here with you?”

“I want to see Tom,” Merope sighed. “He wouldn’t want to see me.”

Out of ideas, out of hope, they did the last thing they had not tried. They lay together in the most intimate fashion they knew.

And, Merope concluded, they should have tried it a long time ago.

*

There was a train.

Lily and Merope untangled from each other and stood, their clothing immediately replaced and unrumpled, as if they had never fucked, as if they had never tasted sweet secrets and felt shudders of wanton need.

“What do we do?”

“Go on,” Merope said. “It’s what we wanted.”

Lily took her hand, turning them both to face the train. Merope looked back at the benches, at her well-trodden paths. She would not miss any of it, she found.

They boarded the train and sat together, and it sped immediately away.


End file.
